Ouroussoff: One Madison Park ‘Dazzling’

Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff thinks One Madison Park—the debacle of a real estate project profiled in this paper in March—constitutes a “dazzling addition to a street that includes two of the city’s most celebrated skyscrapers: Pierre LeBrun’s 1909 Metropolitan Life tower, across the street, and Daniel Burnham’s 1903 Flatiron building, a half block west. It jolts the neighborhood into the present.”

In short, and in contrast to many less bowled-over bystanders, Mr. Ouroussofff loves the new building. Even he is surprised.

The achievement seems particularly improbable, given the firm that designed it. During its more than 20 years of existence, CetraRuddy had never before produced a building of any architectural significance. If it is known at all in the wider architectural world, it is for the infomercial, repeated endlessly on taxicab video screens, in which one of the firm’s founding partners, John Cetra, hawks apartments in a pair of generic glass-and-steel towers in Jersey City.